Word: chambers
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...Berkeley, Calif., one of the world's biggest, most complex and most dangerous scientific instruments was ready for full operation for the first time. Its name was a tongue twister: the liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, designed and built by the University of California's Radiation Laboratory. In the next week or so, a beam of antiprotons from Berkeley's great 6 billion-volt Bevatron will pass through a pipe 200 ft. long, enter an odd-looking building and strike into a glass-topped metal bathtub containing 150 gal. of liquid hydrogen. As the antiprotons travel through...
Glass & Golf. The first bubble chamber, invented in 1953 by Dr. Donald Glaser of the University of Michigan, was a glass tube filled with ether at a temperature that would make it start to boil when pressure was suddenly reduced. If high-energy particles (e.g., protons from a cyclotron) are shot into the ether at the right moment, lines of bubbles form on their trails, thus showing where the particles go and how they interact with atoms in the ether. When Inventor Glaser delivered his classic paper at a Washington physics convention. Physicist Luis Alvarez, associate director of the Radiation...
Liquid hydrogen is rugged stuff to fool with, so cold (boiling point: -252.7° C. at atmospheric pressure) that steel cracks on sudden contact. It must be elaborately refrigerated or it will flash into vapor. Even a small leak is highly explosive. The 150 gal. in Berkeley's chamber have the explosive power...
Alvarez' first model was all glass and only 2 in. in diameter. When it worked, he gradually increased his chambers to 2 in., 4 in., 10 in., and each step multiplied the difficulties until the laboratory blossomed with safety devices. Yet the 10 in. chamber spotted tricks of Bevatron particles that might have been missed by years of work with more primitive instruments-and only whetted Alvarez' desire for more...
Mechanized Dinosaur. With the promise of $2,000,000 from the Atomic Energy Commission, Alvarez and his team went to work on a chamber 6 ft. long. The difficulties became fantastic. The electromagnet surrounding the chamber had to weigh 200 tons. The great machine had to be movable, but wheels were too unstable. Instead, it was given four massive feet on which it could be walked around like a mechanical dinosaur. Leak detectors were installed everywhere to watch for escaping hydrogen; 104 alarm circuits inside the machine flash lights, ring bells and honk horns at the slightest hint of trouble...